LOCALITIES. 
* Seek’st tliou the plasky brink 
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide, 
Oi w here the rocking billows rise and sink 
On the chafed ocean side ?” 
TT^HO can tell of the habits of our wild fowl and aquatic 
biids as well as the men who, day in and day out, 
in cold and heat, and in ail kinds of weather, follow shoot¬ 
ing for a livelihood ? Unfortunately for the public, these 
men cannot, for the most part, spare the time to dot down 
their experience. Indeed, but few of them can write, and 
I what, if recorded, would be of real value to the shooting world 
is lost. The educated sportsman is rarely of assistance in 
this matter, for he, as a general thing, leaves everything to 
his baymeD, and with a profound ignorance as to the habits 
; of the birds, learns little and remembers but little after a 
week’s shooting, save the number and quality of the fowl 
brought to bag during his holiday. If he has had good shoot¬ 
ing, be is generally l.beral to the caterer to hi3 sport; but 
for the life of him he cannot tell why the stools were set to 
windward, or why he had better or worse shooting than the 
guns in the other “rigs.” Our experience has taught us 
that too often the purely scientific man knows even less, and 
that many works on ornithology abound in absurd inaccura¬ 
cies, which lead to “confusion worse confounded.” True, 
the scientists tell us the measurements and weight, and the 
coloring and shading of each bird, but often these descrip¬ 
tions are of the faded plumage cf the dead specimen, and not 
of the live fowl. When colored plates are introduced into 
k their works, they are often so unlike the bird they are in¬ 
tended to represent, that if it were not for the name under¬ 
neath it would be impossible to identify them. In fact, we 
have seen several which resemble Egyptian hieroglyphics 
more than birds that have been seen to fly. It is from works 
